John Edwards has been spotted back together with his alleged mistress, Rielle Hunter. The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcee Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly ...

We’ve done the “Have we won in Iraq?” thing a couple of times recently, without ever really answering the question.  The problem is that there’s no clear definion of “victory” given the vagueness of our objectives. Weblog ...

Pat Lang has a long essay on why Barack Obama will “probably” be elected the 44th president but veers into an uncomfortable conclusion. It seems to me that all of this has inflicted what should be fatal wounds on McCain’s chance of ...

Patrick Fitzgerald highlights an unlikely consequence of the falling dollar:  The NBA is finding it harder to poach the best European talent. It was only a matter of time before the declining dollar affected the world of sport. In years past, the Europe’s ...

The NYT has declined to run an op-ed piece by John McCain in response to last week’s by Barack Obama, CNN reports, instead giving what’s known in academic circles as a “revise and resubmit.” In an e-mail to the McCain campaign, ...

A federal court has thrown out the FCC’s $550,000 fine against CBS for airing the Janet Jackson - Justin Timberlake “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl. The U.S. government’s campaign against television indecency ...

Bob Novak is reporting that John McCain is planning to announce his vice presidential choice this week, presumably in an attempt to grab the press spotlight back while Barack Obama is being feted overseas. He notes that “Mitt Romney has led the ...

Jo Stafford passed away last Wednesday of congestive heart failure at age 90. Her death went mostly unremarked by us, but she was huge in her day. Frank Sinatra, a bandmate of Stafford’s before his own fame took flight, once said of her, “It ...

The Waffles and Chicken Stop Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) ✰ THE WINNERS ✰ First: DL - Are you sure this is the 57th state we’ve hit? Second: Bithead - “Did you ever flashy-thing ...

In anticipation of Sen. Barack Obama’s visit to Afghanistan I thought it might be appropriate to consider the situation there. Both Sens. McCain and Obama have called for achieving victory in Afghanistan. Sen. Obama has characterized the conflict ...

Both Mark Hemingway and Ross Douthat have linked to these recent Pew polling numbers, which indicate that Obama has one point less white evangelical support than Kerry did at this point in the 2004 election. Douthat notes that this isn’t actually ...

How do you reconcile the excitement and enthusiasm of the Obama campaign and Sen. Barack Obama’s apparent confidence with the polls showing a neck and neck race between Sen. Obama and Sen. John McCain? Ignore the polls, says Clive Crook in the ...

Tom Smith has a message for those taking glee at the recent setbacks at Starbucks: [R]emember what coffee was like before Starbucks.  Some of you (though I doubt it, with the readership of this blog) may have cut your teeth on micro-roasted craft coffee ...

Jerry Pournelle posits that, The purpose of modern government is to take money from the folks who save and pay their bills and live within their means, and use that to hire government workers; and to keep their power by using the money to buy votes from ...

Sometimes, Freud told us, a cigar is just a cigar.  Sometimes, though, it’s a cracker. Apparently, there’s a huge wave (that’s media speak for at least two similar incidents) of people using Roman Catholic communion wafers for something ...